Drancia Saga (3DS)

 Apparently, this is an enhanced port of a phone game, and though I don't know what all the enhancements are, I'm going to assume that the most important one is the fact that the 3DS has buttons on it. There's very few types of game where a touchscreen isn't to the detriment of the experience, and though the controls are very simple in Drancia Saga, I can't see it being one of them.

 

What it is, though, is a kind of simple single-screen, single-plane beat em up. Each stage places you in a little one-screen location where enemies will keep spawning. The enemies die in one hit, and you don't need an attack button, as you attack by just walking directly forwards into them. Touch them with any part of you other than your weapon, and you take damage instead. Like in the first two Ys games! After you kill enough of the enemies, a boss will appear for you to fight. Beat it, and go to the next stage. I think there are eight stages. I've got to the eighth stage, and it had the air of finality about it, at least.

 

Though the game itself is very simple, there's a lot of meat in what I'll reluctantly call the meta-game. While playing, various numbers will go up. Killing enemies scores points, and they also drop coins. Collecting coins also scores points. Furthermore, if you kill lots of enemies without taking damage, treasure will appear (and are worth points), and the amount of coins each enemy drops will also increase. Coins themselves have a use as they're used to level up, but I'll get back to that later. When your game ends, you'll be awarded a gem for every hundred points you scored. In the main menu, there's a bar! In the bar, you can listen to the sound test, pointlessly talk to various bar patrons, and most importantly, there'll be a randomly chosen character to buy, for diamonds.

 

It seems like every non-boss enemy is unlockable. Maybe boss characters are unlockable too under certain conditions? I don't know. There's also a bunch of guest characters from other games published by Circle, unlockable by having their host games installed on your 3DS. The game manages to have so many playable character by having them all essentially play the same, with only a few small, but important, differences. Which means it's time to explain levelling up!

 

Every character has their own grid of sixteen squares, connected by a little maze of paths. Each square has something in it: a sword, which expands the length and width of your weapon (oo-er missus), a shield, which reduces the damage you take from enemies, a heart, which (i think) increases the amount of health restored by collecting coins, a show, increasing your movement speed, an orb, giving you a limited-use magic spell, or a burger, restoring your health to full. Some of the squares contain nothing, which does nothing. 

 

To level up, you buy these squares with the coins you've collected. But once you've bought your first square, you next have to buy one connected to it by a path, and so on. Some of the weaker characters have their power ups spread out with lots of blank spaces between them, the strongest characters have a power up in ever square and a path layout that means you can almost always pick whatever you want. Each character also has a magic spell assigned to them, from a small selection. They're all offensive, but some are more useful than others.

 

Drancia Saga isn't a mechanically deep game, and you'll probably figure out the optimum way to tackle each enemy type and boss fight seconds into your first encounter with them. But the absurdly huge amount of characters to play as, along with the general charm of the game and the satisfaction inherent to the super-simple mass-murder of enemies make it a go-to game for me when I want to keep my hands busy while watching TV or whatever since I installed it a few weeks ago. If you like the sound of what I've described here, well, it's a 3DS game that didn't get a physical release, so there's unfortunately no way for you to get ahold of it any more. No way at all. (Wink.)